Pirate Bay Co-Founder Attacks Music Industry With New Gadget

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the beloved (and hated) Pirate Bay, has returned to the public after being released from jail. Now, he has his sights set on the music industry once again, making it the butt of his satirical new gadget.

This machine is called the Kopimashin; its sole purpose in life is to make 100 copies of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” per second. Sunde talked about his Kopimashin on the Konsthack art and hacking forum. Sunde says:

The Kopimashin creates an endless amount of copies of a specific audio track (gnarls barkley’s crazy). The audio track is copied to /dev/null, a unix data pipe for avoiding permanent storage. The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD1,25 per copied piece.

The goal of the kopimashin is to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry.

Based on the methods used by the music industry for calculating revenue loss, Sunde estimates that the Kopimashin has taken $150 million from the music industry with the 120 million copies of “Crazy” that he has created thus far. Sunde hopes to make a total of 13 Kopimashins and display them in art galleries as more of a large-scale way to show the absurdity of the music industry’s IP abuse.

Authorities across the globe have pursued the team behind the Pirate Bay for several years, eventually managing to arrest all three founders of the site in 2014. The Pirate Bay has even been taken down several times, but it has always found a way to reemerge under new domains based in different countries.

The Pirate Bay has supported Bitcoin for quite some time, giving users the option to make anonymous donations to them with the digital currency. The torrent hosting service has their bitcoin address posted at the bottom of their homepage, along with a link to bitcoin.org. The donation address currently listed on the website has received a total of $2783.40 worth of bitcoins in its life span, with the most recent donation taking place yesterday, December 27.

Here is a video of Sunde’s Kopimashin in action:

What do you think of the Kopimashin? Do you think IP is a legitimate entity, or do you support the pirates? Let us know in the comments below!